A Man Four-Square eBook

“I’m comin’ back to see you some
day. Mebbe you’ll feel different then,”
he said.

“I might,” she admitted.

They rounded the bend. Clanton, on horseback,
caught sight of them. He waved his hat and cantered
forward.

“Say, Billie, how much bacon do you reckon we
need to take with us?”

In front of the house Pauline slipped from her horse
and left them discussing the commissary.

Chapter VII

On the Trail

The convalescents rode away into a desert green with
spring. The fragrant chaparral thickets were
bursting into flower. Spanish bayonets studded
the plains. Everywhere about them was the promise
of a new life not yet burnt by hot summer suns to
a crisp.

During the day they ran into a swamp country and crossed
a bayou where cypress knees and blue gums showed fantastic
in the eerie gloom of the stagnant water. From
this they emerged to a more wooded region and made
an early camp on the edge of a grove of ash trees bordering
a small stream where pecans grew thick.

Shortly after daybreak they were jogging on at a walk-trot,
the road gait of the Southwest, into the treeless
country of the prairie. They nooned at an arroyo
seco, and after they had eaten took a siesta during
the heat of the day. Night brought with it a
thunderstorm and they took refuge in a Mexican hut
built of palisades and roofed with grass sod.
A widow lived alone in the jacal, but she made them
welcome to the best she had. The young men slept
in a corner of the hut on a dry cowskin spread upon
the mud floor, their saddles for pillows and their
blankets rolled about them.

While she was cooking their breakfast, Prince noticed
the tears rolling down her cheeks. She was a
comely young woman and he asked her gallantly in the
bronco Spanish of the border if there was anything
he could do to relieve her distress.

She shook her head mournfully. “No, senor,”
she answered in her native tongue. “Only
time can do that. I mourn my husband. He
was a drunken ne’er-do-well, but he was my man.
So I mourn a fitting period. He died in that
corner of the room where you slept.”

“Indeed! When?” asked Billie politely.

“Ten days ago. Of smallpox.”

The young men never ate that breakfast. They
fled into the sunlight and put many hurried miles
between them and their amazed hostess. At the
first stream they stripped, bathed, washed their clothes,
dipped the saddles, and lay nude in the warm sand
until their wearing apparel was dry.

For many days they joked each other about that headlong
flight, but underneath their gayety was a dread which
persisted.

“I’m like Dona Isabel with her grief.
Only time can heal me of that scare she threw into
Billie Prince,” the owner of that name confessed.

“Me too,” assented Clanton, helping himself
to pinole. “I’ll bet I lost a year’s
growth, and me small at that.”